The present invention relates to an edge guide member in a feeder which is incorporated in a recording apparatus for feeding a recording medium to a recording section at which recording is performed on the recording medium. The invention also relates to an edge guide member in a feeder which is incorporated in a liquid ejecting apparatus such as an ink jet recording apparatus for feeding a target medium to a section at which liquid is ejected from a liquid ejecting head toward the target medium.
The term “liquid ejecting apparatus” as used herein includes not only recording apparatus such as a printer, a copier, and a facsimile machine that use an ink jet recording head and perform recording on a recording material by ejecting ink from the recording head but also an apparatus that ejects liquid suitable for a purpose instead of ink from a liquid ejecting head toward a target material and thereby cause the liquid to land on the target material.
Examples of the liquid ejecting head other than the recording head are a colorant ejecting head used for manufacture of color filters of a liquid crystal display or the like, an electrode material (conductive paste) ejecting head used for formation of electrodes of an organic EL display, a field emission display (FED), or the like, a bioorganic material ejecting head used for manufacture of a biochip, and a sample ejecting head as precision pipettes.
In the recording apparatus such as an ink jet printer, recording media such as sheets are stacked on a hopper and automatically fed to a recording section side one by one by vertical movements of the hopper and rotational driving by a feeding roller. The hopper is provided with edge guides. Recording media can be fed without being skewed by setting the edge guides adjacent to the sidelines (edges) of the recording media in accordance with the size of the recording media.
Japanese Utility Model Publication No. 5-12428U discloses a device wherein an edge guide movable in the sheet medium width direction is provided so as to extend parallel with the side edges of sheets. The edge guide is equipped with a retractable limiter which projects from a guiding face of the edge guide toward the side edges of sheets. When sheets are set, the gap between the guiding face and the sheets is set by bringing the limiter into contact with the sheets. As a result, no friction occurs between the sheets and the guiding face and skewing is prevented.
On the other hand, in recent years, a single recording apparatus has come to perform recording on sheets having a wide range of size (e.g., from the B4 size to the name card size). In such a recording apparatus, the feeder is required to feed sheets of various sizes without skewing them. One countermeasure would be elongate the edge guides to prevent skewing, which, however, raises a problem that the size of the feeder itself is increased.